Language acquisition across varieties in the Alemannic area

Traditionally, in the Lake Constance region, which spans Austria, Germany and Switzerland, Alemannic dialects are spoken. In everyday life they are complemented to varying degrees and with different evaluations by the German standard language. Accordingly, children grow up in an environment that is more or less influenced by dialect and standard language: While dialect use tends to decrease on the German side, dialect is alive on the Austrian side despite early onset of standard contact via reading aloud and the media. In Switzerland, dialect indisputably is the primary means of communication in early childhood. The present project focusses on the questions of how dialectstandard variation affects child language development and what consequences the different constellations of dialect and standard in different Alemannic areas have on the acquisition of these two varieties. In the project, data is collected from children of different age groups in the Alemannic region of Austria, Germany and Switzerland. In total, more than 500 children between the ages of 2 and 8 complete various linguistic tasks that provide information about their abilities in dialect and standard language, but also about the development of written language skills and language attitudes. The aim is to investigate the developmental course of perception and processing of dialect and standard language as well as the children`s knowledge of the social meaning and situational functions of the surrounding varieties. The data reveals not only the achievement of phonetic and grammatical milestones in the surrounding varieties or the development and expansion of written language skills but provides insight into mental processing and the emergence of different evaluation patterns. The project thus builds a comprehensive empirical database on the parallel child acquisition of regional dialects and the standard German language. The project team consists of researchers with a different focus in the study of language variation and language acquisition (dialectology, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics) from different Austrian, German and Swiss universities (Salzburg, Marburg, Weingarten and Rorschach). The project team aims to shed light on the acquisition of dialect and standard language in different country-specific social and educational contexts. The main aim is to provide insights into the question of how bivarietal acquisition depends on language usage, language attitudes, and language educational conditions and how it differs from the acquisition of standard German as described so far.